Infoniwa

In Chinese myth, a young king invented civilization on a distant island through the guidance of twin gods, Infoniwa (sometimes Infoniwoo) and Awun. They promised to protect his people by warning them in advance of any impending danger. At the precise center of the kingdom, in a holy shrine, were statues of the divine brothers; if the faces of these statues turned red, they warned, the island would be destroyed.

For many years, the king and his subjects were virtuous and prosperous. With opulence, however, came greed. The people grew cynical of any spiritual values and laughed at their king’s belief in the gods’ warning as ridiculous superstition. One night, a blasphemous prankster stole into the shrine and, as a joke, daubed the faces of Infoniwa and Awun with red paint. The king, an old man now and the progenitor of many fine offspring, still honored the gods. When he saw their painted statues, he summoned his royal household and ordered an immediate evacuation. Loaded down with all their possessions as they hurriedly made for the royal yacht, the king and his family members were derided in the streets by mobs of insolent people. But as the ship disappeared over the horizon, the island was convulsed by earthquakes and sank with all its inhabitants into the depths of the sea. Meanwhile, the king with his wife and children landed safely on the shore near Shanghai, where they established China’s first imperial dynasty.

Although Atlantis was on the other side of the world from China, the resemblance of this legend in so many particulars with Plato’s fourth-century B.C. account argues for a common source. In both the Chinese and Greek versions, the divine founders are twins, while a prosperous, formerly upstanding people degenerate into selfishness and are punished with the inundation of their island kingdom. In most flood myths around the world, only a patriarch with his family and followers survive, because he believed a warning of some kind that was scorned by others. So too, the deluge hero becomes the founding father of a civilization, people, or dynasty, whose descendants assert their legitimacy by tracing their unbroken lineage to him.

(—Frank Joseph, The Atlantis Encyclopedia)